The Full Confession of Rebecca Flack
by La Guera
Summary: Don Flack learns his wife's dirty little secret the hard way.
1. Part I

Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.

All recognizable people, places, and events in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. In all cases, no infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

**A/N:** This is pure crack and was begun before COTP, so there is no mention of the bombing herein. However, it fits into the continuity of my crack HP/CSI:NYVerse. This would have occurred in February 2008, five months before Junior's birth. It should explain incidents in "Wonderland".

"No," said his wife quietly when the man with the gun said he'd kill her. "You won't."

Don Flack still wasn't sure how this had happened, or even _what_ had happened. It had been a blitzkrieg attack. One minute, he had been sitting at his desk in the bullpen, splitting a grinder with Rebecca in lieu of a proper anniversary dinner, and the next, he and the entire 14th precinct had been staring down the barrel of a Colt .45. He still had a dribble of mustard on his chin from the last bite he'd taken before the doors had blown open to admit the devil and the cold winter air, and the aftertaste of onions was hot and sweet on his tongue as he looked at the barrel pointed at his wife's rounded, pregnant belly.

There were four months of unborn child in her belly, seeded there by a lazy tryst in the back of a departmental Chevy Avalanche down by the Hudson River. He'd taken her there because she said she'd never necked in a car before, and as her husband, he'd counted it his duty to see that she wanted for nothing with which he could reasonably provide her, even teenaged memories created fifteen years too late. So, he'd whisked her away to the river with a bottle of red wine and a cooler full of sliced fruits and cold cuts. He'd folded down the backseat, and they'd talked and fed each other bites of melon and listened to the radio, and sometime between the Beach Boys' "Kokomo" and Otis Redding's "Sittin'(On the Dock of the Bay)," he'd created a tangible reminder of that night.

She'd told him the day after Thanksgiving, come to him white-faced and trembling and clutching the pregnancy test in one small hand. He hadn't realized what it was at first, had wondered, in fact, why she was trying to hand him a tampon in the middle of the Knicks game. Then his brain had caught up with his eyes, and he'd turned the slender stem of the test over and over in his disbelieving hands, studied the parallel blue lines from every angle. She hadn't said a word, just sat with her hands in her lap, fingers worrying the hem of the Yankees t-shirt she was wearing as a nightshirt. Now and then, she'd paused in her endless fretting to swipe irritably at her streaming eyes.

"Hey, why are you cryin', doll," he'd asked, shaken from his sloe-eyed stupor by the sight of a tear streaming down her cheek.

"It's positive."

"Yeah, I didn't think you were comin' out here to show me some abstract art," he had replied, and then he'd snagged the footrest of her chair and closed the distance between them. "Is that a problem?" he'd asked gently. "'Cause if it is, I'll, uh, I'll support… I'll understand."

It had been a lie, but one he had been willing to tell for the love of her. He loved her too much to risk losing her for any reason, and if that meant accompanying her to the clinic and holding her hand while modern medicine obliterated an ancient miracle, then he would. He would close his eyes and grit his teeth against the protests of his Roman Catholic soul, and when it was over, he would bring her home and pretend it had never happened.

"No. I mean, I don't know," she'd said thickly. "It's not that I don't want- How could I not? It's _yours. _Ours. I just-," She'd trailed off, and her Adam's apple had bobbed. "Are we ready for this?"

He'd patted the couch. "C'mere, doll."

She'd set the brakes, opened the footrests, and pivoted onto the couch without a word and snuggled against him, disheveled and feverish from suppressed weeping. He'd pressed a butterfly kiss to the sensitive shell of her ear.

"What do _you _want?" He'd caught a strand of her hair and wound it lazily around his fingertips.

She'd rested her hand on his chest. "I've thought about this, but to tell the truth, I never thought it would happen."

A soft snort of amusement. "I don't see why not. Accordin' to Mrs. Petrinski, we're like fuckin' rabbits, and no, I won't pardon the pun. Even I gotta admit I can't keep my hands off you."

She'd chuckled. "Yeah, I know. I guess I just figured my body would never sustain a pregnancy."

"The doctors tell you that you wouldn't?"

"No, but they've been wrong before. They told my mother I'd be a vegetable."

"Yeah? Well, fuck 'em," he'd said fiercely, and rested her head on his chest. "I'm damn proud of my turnip lovin'."

She'd laughed at that, hard and long, and he'd reveled in the sound and the shuddering vibration of her angular body against his toned, muscled one. He loved to make her laugh, to see her eyes light up with unexpected pleasure. When she threw back her head and exposed the pale stem of her throat and the uneven ivory of her teeth to the light, the taint of the city and the festering, virulent hate of its denizens left him, and the air he drew into his lungs was not so sour.

"This turnip loves you," she'd murmured when the laughter had tapered to watery, hiccoughing giggles.

"We can do this, you know. The department has good insurance, and what it doesn't cover, Medicare will. If that don't work, I can take out a loan."

"It's not the bills I worry about. What if I can't? What if something happens, and I lose it? It would be all my fault, and-," Her mouth had worked, and her fingers had tightened convulsively in the fabric of his t-shirt.

"Hey, ssshhh." He'd pressed three fingers to her trembling lips. "Listen to me. You're not gonna lose nothin', all right? You're too stubborn to let this baby go now that it's inside you. As a matter of fact, I pity the poor son of a bitch doctor who tries to tell you to push if you don't wanna when the time comes." He'd brushed his lips over the crown of her head.

"But-,"

"But nothin'. Crack whores and junkies have babies every day, and so can you. If you don't want this baby 'cause you aren't ready or 'cause you aren't willing to shoulder the responsibility, I can respect that. But don't you fuckin' dare drop your balls on me."

Another snicker. "Babe, I never had any balls to begin with. Those were your department."

"Smartass," he'd grumbled amiably.

Her brow had furrowed. "But what if-?"

"You miscarry?" he'd finished for her. "Everybody runs that risk, doll. My aunt on my Pop's side had four before she had her daughter, and she never had so much as indigestion. If it happens, there's nothin' we can do about it, and if you don't wanna try again, then I'll go down and get myself clipped."

She'd gaped at him. "You will _not._

"Why not?" he'd countered. "It's my equipment."

"Because what if I die and you marry again?"

"There isn't gonna be anybody else, doll," he'd said flatly. "Not ever."

She'd opened her mouth to protest, then decided against it. They had spent the next few minutes in companionable silence, listening to the rhythm of heartbeats and breaths. He had watched the Knicks fuddle their way to another spectacular loss on the jagged shoulders of string beans and gangly praying mantises, and she had snaked her hand beneath his shirt to tease the coarse hairs of his chest.

"Are you ready for this?" he'd asked as a Knick had lobbed an airball toward the visitors' basket.

"No." She'd kissed his chin. "I'm not."

She was right. Neither of them had been remotely prepared. Not for the nausea that sent her scrambling for the bathroom or the nearest wastebasket and often jolted him from a dead sleep with its ferocity. Not for her red face as she hunched over the cool porcelain bowl and heaved her guts. Not for the back pain or the fatigue or the loss of concentration, and most assuredly not for the giddy fear that waylaid him every time he saw her steadily expanding stomach or felt the unexpected firmness of it beneath his hands.

They had both been blindsided, but it was Rebecca who had landed on her feet first. Standing behind his desk and watching the sleek barrel of the gun sniff blindly for his sleeping child, he could recall with absolute clarity the moment in which she had regained her faltering equilibrium.

_She was on that table with her bladder full of water and nothing between the ultrasound tech and her morning glory but a flimsy paper smock. Fear and spasticity made her rigid, and she fought the ultrasound wand and whimpered and twisted from its cold, clinical touch, so unlike your passionate heat. She pressed her lips together and clutched the sides of the table, and you felt like such a treacherous bastard prying her knees apart. The tech offered to bring in restraints, but that was an indignity you would not sanction, and with soft words and softer hands, you convinced her to submit._

_She turned her face away from the hinterlands underneath the smock and looked instead at your face and the hideous art deco painting on the far wall. She cried out when it was done, a sharp, furious cry of surprise and resigned hurt that twisted your heart inside your chest because the last thing you ever wanted to do was cause her pain. You knew he was only doing his job, but you were tempted to slap the tech for his cavalier attitude all the same, pain for pain and tears for tears._

_And then there it was, impossibly tiny, nestled inside her with the miniscule stubs of its forming arms tucked and twitching against its castor-bean body. The picture was grainy and indistinct, but you saw its movements as it dreamed and heard God's voice as His unseen hands gave it form. And even if you'd been blind, there was still the heartbeat, rapid as a sparrow's. Your jaw tightened, and your eyes burned, and as you stared at the rest of your life, you were possessed of a single, all-consuming thought:_

Mine. _That's what you thought, sitting in that chair with the fingers of one hand entwined with Rebecca's and the other hand brushing her forehead. A single syllable of absolute possessiveness, primitive and unapologetic. That life on the screen was yours and hers and God's and no one else's, and you resolved right then that anyone who interfered with it would never see another daylight. You wanted to take her off the examination table and spirit her away where nothing could hurt either of them. The tech had no right to bear witness to this private miracle, job be damned, and your tongue cramped and prickled with the desire to lash and sting and drive him out._

_You might have done it, too, but then Rebecca, spraddle-legged and uncomfortable with modern medicine's prick lodged rudely between her thighs, lifted her head beneath your petting hand and studied the screen intently._

Is that the baby? _she asked quietly, propped on her elbows with her chin tucked to her chest._

Got it in one_, the tech replied amiably, and gently shifted the wand for a better angle._

_It happened in an instant, the shifting of sunlight on a cloudy day. The diffuse, undefined fear that had plagued her since she rolled into the living room with an EPT in her hand disappeared, and in its place was a serene determination. She lifted your hand to her mouth and kissed it, and her eyes never left that wriggling shape on the screen. She was taking the measure of her responsibility then, giving face to the unknown._

_Her eyes still hold the sheen of unshed tears as she retches into the toilet or the wastebasket beside the bed, and she still flinches from the prick of the needle. There are still nights when she shambles out of the bedroom to curl beside you on the couch and doze fitfully, overwhelmed by the path that lies before her, but there is no more despair, no more flailing panic. She has seen the beginning and knows there is an end, and she is bound to see it through. Her stoicism in the face of the uncertain inevitable both reassures and terrifies you, and you love her for it._

Ironically, the day Rebecca had rediscovered her equilibrium had been the day he'd lost his. He'd taken her home on the subway, his badge on prominent display to deter thieves, muggers, and unwashed perverts, and when he'd made sure she was comfortable at home, with water and the phone within easy reach, he'd retreated to the street and the stinging, breath-stealing cold of December.

He'd walked to the precinct with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his leather overcoat and snow crunching beneath his shoes. The parts of his face unprotected by the muffler he wore stung with the cold, prickled and grew numb, but he was absurdly grateful for the numbness. It had cooled his burning skin and slowed his frantic train of thought, the better to grasp them in clumsy, unsteady hands. He'd breathed in the smells and tastes of New York winter-the acrid smoke of burning rubber in rusting barrels, car exhaust, bundled bodies, fresh snow, and freezing piss. It was familiar and soothing, and he'd drawn it all deeply into his lungs and held it there, as though their mere presence would be enough to stave off the changes on the horizon.

The ultrasound had made it real. Until he had seen the proof of it with his own eyes, the idea that he was soon to be a father had been an abstract dream, a faraway probability that could not touch him. It had been a child's painting, done in awkward, bold strokes and vivid colors, the reds, whites, yellows, and blues of the Candyland game he had sometimes played as a kid with his baby sister. The colors of Tomorrow and Not Soon.

But reality was in black and white, stark and unforgiving, and it had told him that in seven months' time, his life of carefree autonomy would be over. He would be responsible for a life he had created. There would be pain and tears and bills, and every bullet meant for him now would have the potential to destroy three lives. If he died tomorrow, Rebecca would be not just a devastated widow with grief stamped on her face and smeared on her hands in red, white, and blue, but a single mother with a ramshackle, recalcitrant body and the condescending scrutiny of the world on her shoulders. She'd be fending off well-intended well-wishers by day and wrestling her demons by night, and there would be none to grant her safe harbor.

_Not to mention your mother, _a voice inside his head had pointed out with savage glee. _She never approved of the broken girl you brought home with such pride. That was the most awkward, painful night of your life, and you never asked Rebecca to go back, though she has for your sake. Your mother is just as tough as your father, but far less principled when it comes to what is hers. She won't hesitate to wrest the living legacy of her sainted, dead son from his inferior widow in the name of doing what is best for the baby. She will steal that baby from its mother's very breast if she can manage it. Your father might put up a token protest, but a token is all it will be. When it comes to Familia Flack, Ana Flack has always ruled the roost._

_Even if the worst doesn't happen, and you successfully dodge bullets and your family history of heart disease for the next twenty years, how the hell can you hope to raise a functional child? You're a fuck-up, pure and simple. You let your sister die when you were sixteen, and now you've gone and gotten your physically fragile wife pregnant._

_What if she can't handle it? What if you come home one night and find her on the bathroom floor in a puddle of blood, legs spread and your baby's premature head slipped through the umbilical cord like a noose? Suppose she makes it to term. She could always die on the table, bleeding out in the stirrups while the nurses tend to your screaming child, who bought its first breath by dint of her last. Can you live with that? Can you stand to visit two graves at Christmas instead of one, sleeping baby in a sling tucked against your chest?_

He had seen it all with terrible clarity, and as he'd walked, the city had begun to blur on the periphery of his vision, until all he could see were Rebecca's blood-smeared thighs and her agonized face, contorted with the ruthless pangs of childbirth.

_She'll die,_ the voice had whispered. _She'll die and leave you just like Diana did. It'll be déjà vu all over again. You'll sit in the front of the church and stare at the ebony casket on its polished steel runners and the spray of roses arranged so artfully on the lid. You'll stare at them with raw, dry eyes and wonder what sweet, screaming retard bought roses when everyone knows Rebecca loved sunflowers, with their enormous, nodding heads, thick stems, and bright yellow leaves that reminded her of the Florida sunshine she left behind. Your suit will fit this time, but the anguish will be the same as it was all those years ago. You'll sit with the baby in your lap, and it will shriek for the comfort of a breast whose milk has curdled._

_You'll go home to your empty apartment and wander through the rooms, opening the drawers and closets and running your chapped fingers over her clothes in weary reverence. You'll pull out her favorite shirt or a pair of her underclothes and press them to your nose until all scent is leached from it. You'll feed your squalling child a bottle of thin formula, and then you'll sleep on the sofa because the bed is too big without her in it. The narrow couch will remind you of the narrow, eternal bed in which she sleeps, and as long as you keep her underwear fisted in your fingers, you'll keep the nightmares at bay._

_You'll spend the rest of your life caught between your dead sister's rosary and your child, souvenirs of your most grievous failures._

The images conjured by the poison-tongued voice had come so quickly and so furiously that it had dizzied and nauseated him. He'd wound up staggering to a nearby news kiosk and buying a copy of the first paper upon which his hand had fallen. He'd carried it to a nearby stoop and sat down hard with it clutched in his fumbling hands. He'd opened it under the pretense of reading, but his hands had been trembling so badly that the pages had rattled and rustled noisily in his grip. In the end, he'd sat with the paper folded haphazardly on his lap and mentally recited the starting lineup of the Rangers until the world came back into focus.

Never in his most feverish and lurid imaginings of her end had he thought it would come here. By all rights, this should have been the safest place in the city for her, surrounded as she was by a wall of blue and her husband, who was armed with 9mms at hip and shoulder and a service pistol taped to one ankle. She should have been untouched and untouchable, and yet there she sat, a gun pointed at her undefended belly while her supercop husband stood behind his desk with a smear of mustard on his chin.

_She wouldn't be here if it weren't for you, _pointed out the gleeful, capering demon that had plagued him since childhood. _It's your fifth wedding anniversary, and she should be celebrating with sunflowers and foot rubs and a sirloin cooked medium-rare. She would be, if you hadn't called her with fours hours to go before your dinner reservation and canceled in the name of justice. A freshman at NYU was strangled with her own panties and raped with a table lamp, and one look at her mother's anguished face assured that there would be neither time nor place for romance tonight._

_Rebecca's tongue told you it would be all right, but you heard the false notes beneath her forced gaiety, the forlorn, brittle hurt beneath the platitudes she has learned by rote and the remembrances of anniversaries already missed. Like your third, which you spent in an interrogation room with a perp who had raped, beaten, and stabbed a twelve-year-old girl. You got the confession, but not until February second had passed into February third, and when you walked through the door at two o'clock in the morning, Rebecca had long since been in bed. You crawled in beside her without even bothering to shower, and you were too tired to give her so much as a consolation fuck. Happy anniversary, doll, and I'm sorry to smell like blood and tears._

_The next morning, you were coherent enough to notice the present sitting on the kitchen table. Red foil and white satin ribbon. You picked it up and examined it while you sipped your coffee, turned the small, square box in your hand. It had your name on the front, written in her painfully crabbed handwriting, and so you set your coffee cup on the table and opened the box._

_You stared at the contents of the box in silence and dropped it to the table with a graceless thump. It wasn't a shaver or a set of dress socks or a tie as she'd gotten for special occasions past. It was worse, because she had put her thought and heart into it. You turned the box upside down so you wouldn't have to see the pair of New York Rangers tickets with last night's date on them and went into the bedroom._

_She was in front of the bedroom mirror, combing conditioner into her still-damp hair. The air was humid with steam and smelled of Pert Plus, heather, and honeysuckle soap. She saw your reflection in the mirror and smiled._

Heya, babe, _she said. _Rough night last night? _Cheerful, as though she had not spent her evening watching the hours tick inexorably away to the wan glow of the television set._

Yeah. Yeah, it was. Some sicko raped and murdered a little girl.

Oh. _Just that. Nothing more. Her face did not soften, and her eyes did not darken with sympathetic horror. Her fingers pulled the plastic teeth of the comb through the blonde mat of her hair with stubborn implacability._

_You stood beside the bed in your rumpled boxer shorts and rubbed your nape, paper scraping paper in the silence of the room. _I, uh, I saw the present in there on the table.

Did you? _Her voice was even, but the comb faltered for the briefest instant._

How'd you get 'em? That game's been sold out for three days.

I bought them three weeks ago. _Her voice was still even, but the comb was flying now._

Three weeks? You been thinkin' about it that long?

_She looked at you as if you'd asked why she breathed. _Of course. I actually started thinking about it two months ago. Hard not to, you know. Best day of my life, and in between lectures and papers, I've got all the time in the world. Maybe it's just a girl thing. _She wasn't looking at you anymore, and she was talking too quickly, free hand flitting futilely over the assorted bottles and baubles on the dresser._

_You wanted to tell her that it wasn't just a "girl thing", that that day had meant as much to you as it did to her, that while you were scarfing a dog on the steps of the precinct with your elbow propped on the vendor cart and your notebook in one hand, you were wishing like hell that she was with you. But instead, you opened your mouth and said, _I'm sorry I didn't get to enjoy them.

Me, too, babe. I even laid out your manky old Messier jersey and your long joh- But it…it doesn't matter. It doesn't; you had more important things to worry about. There'll be more games, right? _The smile on her face was too wide, and her eyes were too bright, and she was moving without purpose, picking up barettes and cleansing cloths and setting them down again. If you closed your eyes, you'd hear the scream behind the chatter._

_You padded across the room and wrapped your arms around her from behind to still the frantic, jerky movements of her arms before she knocked the bottles of perfume onto the floor. You felt her trembling despite the padded back of her chair, a jittery thrum of harnessed adrenaline, and self-loathing was bitter inside your mouth. You knew what she was doing because you'd spent a lifetime performing the same tired magic on your father every time he blew off a Little League game or a trip to Coney Island. It was the gospel of Nothing To See Here and Everything's Fine, and you used it to pack the wounds he inflicted and insulate yourself against further damage._

_You'd sworn never to give your own children a reason to need that old and terrible magic, and to see your wife employ it twisted a salted dagger in your gut. You also knew there was nothing you could say to ease the sting of her unspoken disappointment, so you lifted her hair from her nape and pressed cool kisses to the pale flesh you found and murmured nonsense syllables of apology and comfort._

Don't. Don't, _you whispered, and trailed your lips over the sharp, bony curve of her shoulder. _Don't. It's all right.

_She didn't move. She sat, rigid and unyielding, in your arms. Then her head fell back against your chest. _I missed you, _she said in a small voice. Her eyes were closed, and moisture glistened in her eyelashes like condensation._

I-, _you began, suddenly keenly aware of how fragile she was within the solid circle of your arms, but you could not apologize for doing your duty, for being who and what you had always been, _would _not. _Three years ago yesterday was a damn fine day. A-1A, as a matter of fucking fact, and as soon as I get a fuckin' day off, I'm gonna prove it. _You nipped her neck and sucked the delicate skin between your teeth, and you prayed that your clumsy gesture of atonement would be enough. _

Just A-1A? _she grumbled, but she smiled, however faintly, and craned her neck to peck the stubble on your chin._

Hey, that's high praise comin' from me. Messer told me I was doomin' myself to the old ball and chain.

Yeah, well, Messer can just go right on strokin' it to the staples in the goddamned _Playboy_ centerfold, _she muttered peevishly. _

Trust me, doll, he's got no problem pullin' chicks.

_She snorted. _He'll have plenty of problems when the day before taxes are due rolls around and I won't do his taxes. I'll have a mortgage on _his _balls for the next thirty years.

_You laughed until you cried, not because it was the height of hilarity, but because it was the Rebecca to whom you were accustomed and with whom you were desperately in love, sarcastic and bitter as smoked anise and full of devilish mischief. You guffawed and snorted and rocked to and fro with her, relieved because the wound was not mortal. It was fixable, and you vowed to soothe it the minute you got the chance._

_For once, you were as good as your unspoken word. You picked her up from her office at NYU and took her to a Thai restaurant Hammerbeck had mentioned earlier in the week. The lights were low and the food was plentiful and excellent, spicy and succulent and exotic on the tongue. You talked and she listened, chin propped on her interlaced hands, and you listened in turn. You had no idea what a Krieds algorithm was, nor did you particularly care, but it was glorious to discuss a subject other than blood and bodies and blunt force trauma. Besides, she clearly reveled in your undivided, if befuddled, attention, and it amused you to watch her growing excitement as she tried to explain it. She was giddy and demonstrative, and when you pulled her to you for a kiss outside the restaurant, her heartbeat was a rapid flutter beneath her blouse._

_You took her home and gave her a massage, and when she was boneless and malleable beneath your hands, you put the leftovers from the restaurant to good use and ate them from her shivering body as slowly and thoroughly as you could, careful to keep the spiced food from tender flesh. She writhed and twisted and whimpered beneath you, and near the end, when the air was thick and redolent with the musky scent of sex and sweat and ringing with the staccato beat of Mrs. Petrinski's broom handle against the adjacent wall, she whispered things into your ear not heard on a longshoreman's sea-brined tongue._

_You'd fixed the damage then, and ever since, you have been mindful of the day. People still kill and die on the second of February, and you still answer the call to the hunt, but you make sure to call her and remind her that February second is still the best day of your life. Those two minutes on the phone are the best you've ever spent, and even if you come home with the rising of the sun, her eyes are peaceful with the knowledge that she is loved. So when you heard that brittle disappointment in her voice, you told her to meet you at the precinct in an hour, and you had the hoagie waiting when she rolled into the bullpen. It wasn't much, but it was an anniversary dinner, and the way her face lit up made you feel like a million bucks._

_Now she's sitting here with a gun at her distended belly and a whackjob at the trigger._

For someone being confronted with her own mortality, his wife was remarkably sedate. She sat with her hands folded loosely in her lap. A sardonic smile danced in the corners of her mouth, and her eyes were alive and vibrant inside her face, cobalt blue and snapping with energy.

"Hey, buddy," Flack said slowly. "Just take it easy. Nobody's gonna hurt you in here. Why don't you just put the gun down, and we can talk about this?"

"Shut up, Muggle filth!" the man shrieked, and the gun twitched spasmodically in his grip.

_Not my wife; not my baby. _"Okay, okay. You don't wanna put the gun down, that's fine. Just point it at me, then."

"You will leave the gun precisely where it is," Rebecca said coolly, each word enunciated with cutting exactitude, as though she were addressing an unruly student.

"Ma'am, I need you to be quiet and let the police handle this," he told her.

"Mmm," she said dismissively. "A smashing job they've done so far."

_Dammit, Rebecca, this isn't a game or some made-for-TV movie where I get a second take if he pulls the trigger. If that happens, I lose you both. Be quiet. Just shut the fuck up until I get you out of here. Once I get this asshole under control, you can talk all you want. You can talk me to sleep with your mouth and your caressing, gesticulating hands, and I'll listen. I swear. I will listen to every word you have to say for the rest of my life. _

"Ma'am, with all due respect, I need you to shut the fuck up," he snapped, and she gave a nigh-imperceptible flinch.

"Your concern is duly noted, Detective." Cold. "But I'm afraid you'll have to go fuck yourself." Wounded anger.

"Shut up, both of you," the man snarled, and ran a filthy, blackened-nailed hand through long, unkempt, impossibly blond hair.

"Why don't you just let her go? Whatever your beef is, this lady's got nothin' to do with it. You gotta roomful of cops here as hostages. You don't need her."

The man snorted and tightened his grip on the gun. "On the contrary, you blubbering twit, she has everything to do with why I'm here. And drop the bloody charade, why don't you? I know she's your wife. We've been watching for years."

"Of course you have. Since the day I left, like as not." Rebecca shifted in her chair, and the gun followed her movement.

The man rolled his eyes. "Don't flatter yourself. We had more pressing matters on hand back then. Like exterminating the Mudblood filth and getting rid of Harry bloody Potter."

Rebecca snorted. "From the looks of you, Malfoy, I gather neither objective met with rousing success."

Flack watched the exchange in mute bewilderment. The language was English, and yet he found that he could not understand any of it. In all the colorful vernacular of the Five Boroughs, he had never heard of Muggles or Mudbloods. Rebecca, however, was unfazed by the bizarre terminology if her expression was any indication. It was wistful, longing, as though recalling people and places she had once loved, but had thought never to see again.

_Should old acquaintance be forgot, _he thought, and his mouth went dry. "You know this guy?" he asked helplessly.

"He's…an old schoolmate."

He blinked. "From that place in St. Augustine?"

A single shake of her head. "Not that one, babe. The one in Scotland. The one you can't find in your databases, no matter how hard you look."

"You knew-,"

"Of course I did, sweetheart." It was gentle. "You're a cop. It's what you do."

_You've wondered about the blank space in her life since the day you married her, the unblemished tabula rasa of the three years between fifteen and seventeen. She's plied you with scraps and tantalizing fragments when your curiosity has grown too insistent, shown you fleeting, distorted glimpses into her private River Lethe, but she has never revealed the entire picture. She deflects your prying fingers with kisses and declarations of love and sly asides, and by the time you feel the urge to ask her again, all the ground you have gained with your patient chiseling has been lost._

_Now all your questions are about to be answered on the point of a gun, the truth hidden beneath a transient's layer of dirt. Are you sure you want to know?_

He wanted to sit down, but he wasn't certain the chair was still directly behind his ass anymore, and besides, to sit would be a sign of weakness he could ill afford. If he sat, this Malfoy nutjob might take the opportunity to put a bullet into Rebecca's abdomen and his baby's brain. So he pressed his palms against the cluttered surface of his desk, bit his tongue until warm copper flooded his mouth, and willed his feet and knees to hold him up.

"You haven't told him?" Malfoy asked incredulously, and capered from foot to foot in a jig of glee. "He doesn't know what you are?"

"No," Rebecca replied through gritted teeth. "I didn't. He was a Muggle and a police officer besides, and I didn't think it prudent."

"Bollocks, Stanhope. You didn't tell him because you were afraid he'd leave if he knew what you were, what you'd _done._"

"Your Legilimency is rusty, Malfoy," Rebecca retorted, but her pale face had grown paler still, and her hands had curled into fists in her lap.

"Oh, no, Stanhope," Malfoy purred. "No, I don't think it is. One abomination, he could stomach, but not two. Maybe he could ignore your twisted limbs and ugly face long enough to implant that rotting Squib in your belly, but if he'd known you were a heretic from which his cherished Muggle sensibilities flee, if he'd smelled the sour taint of magic coursing through your veins, you'd still be a spinster, hoarding your worthless maidenhead and stroking your wet, aching cunt between institutional bed covers." The muzzle of the gun nuzzled her belly like an affectionate pet, and her skin retreated from the contact with a visible ripple.

_It's touching my baby, _Flack thought, and was possessed of a rage so complete that it stopped his breath. His fingers throbbed with the need to throttle and crush and break and longed for the fluttering softness of Malfoy's throat. He wanted to hear the snap of bone and watch the light ebb from those bloodshot, grey eyes. He slipped a hand off his desk and reached for the gun at his hip.

Malfoy cocked the hammer of the gun. "I wouldn't if I were you," he said breezily. "My finger might slip."

Flack froze, hand hovering over the butt of his gun.

_Don't risk it, son, _the voice of his father counseled. _He'll open her up and splatter her guts to the four corners before you get off a round. Let him talk. Sooner or later, he'll get cocky or distracted, and you can blow his brains to Kingdom Come and wear his balls as a souvenir._

He forced himself to relax and returned his hand to the desk. "What are you talkin' about?" he asked to distract himself from the impotent rage that cramped his gut and tinted the world red around the edges. "What do you mean, 'what she is.'"

"She's a witch and a merry murderess, to boot," Malfoy announced gaily. "She led fourteen of her friends to die on the Curse-blasted moors of Scotland. She wheedled and manipulated and cajoled, and one by one, they all fell down. When they were dead, she went back to the castle with blood and brains and bits of bone in her hair and called it victory. She lied and stole and tortured, uttered Unforgivables with relish. She framed a teacher for assault upon a student at fifteen, and at sixteen, she tortured a teacher into insanity. At seventeen, she fled the field of battle and licked her wounds in the Colonies, where she added Muggle-fucking harlot to her list of dubious accomplishments."

"You're fucking crazy," Flack said flatly.

It was the only plausible explanation, and one he would have come up with much sooner had he not been out of his mind with fear for his fledgling family. Now that he got a good look at the man in front of him, it was obvious that he was in the grips of a hardcore drug addiction. He was emaciated, and his spindly, fleshless arms were riddled with fading bruises and the angry, red weals of fresh track marks. His eyes were ringed with exhaustion and muddied with the opiate haze of smack. His clothes were tattered rags. They might once have been black, but life on the streets had dulled them to a filthy, tumorous gray. He stank of garbage and piss and rancid desperation.

_If he's just bugfuck crazy, _his father mused, _then why does Rebecca understand him? She's a rational woman, Donnie boy, a keeper of numbers and inarguable absolutes. You've sat on the couch and watched her excoriate a grad student for building his hypothesis out of whole cloth and wishful thinking. She has no time for fairy tales, but she hasn't batted an eyelash at any of this. In fact, she seems oddly relieved, as if this is a reckoning a long time coming. If it's lunacy that moves him, it's a shared madness._

"Rebecca?" he said uncertainly. "Rebecca?" Pleading.

She closed her eyes, then, and a single tear rolled down her cheek. Despite his best intentions to remain upright, his knees unhinged with an audible creak, and he sat in his chair with an undignified, graceless thump. He felt dizzy and sick, and the roast beef and tomato he'd eaten earlier burned in the back of his throat. He closed his eyes to shut out the familiar room that had suddenly warped and twisted into torturous, alien angles.

"Oh, fuck," he moaned, and cupped his head in his hands.

"What do you want, Malfoy?" Rebecca asked. Her voice was rough and weary, and her shoulders were slumped.

"I should think that would be obvious, Stanhope. I need your Arithmantic skill."

"I've no interest in helping you, Malfoy, and even if the world had upended on its axis and softened my brain to custard, why would you need me? I thought the Dark Lord had a cadre of skilled Arithmancers at his beck and call."

"Mmm, he did," Malfoy conceded. "Imperius was quite useful in that regard. But after so many years, we've discovered that brains subjected to twelve consecutive years of forceful persuasion at the tip of a wand must eventually disintegrate into organic porridge. Our last Arithmancer succumbed a fortnight ago. Most unpleasant. She gouged out her eyes with the nib of her quill and smeared them over the walls in a futile attempt to see."

"And you want an Arithmancer who can be pressed into voluntary service, or what passes for it."

"Precisely. Apparently, gobbling Muggle cock has not yet destroyed your critical faculties."

"Fuck you," Rebecca spat.

"I might have done before you fouled yourself with this idiot Muggle. You're repulsive, yes, but the power you possess in that misbegotten body of yours would almost have been worth it. Besides, closing one's eyes and thinking of England is not the sole province of a hard-done-by witch." He offered her a smug, humorless smile.

"You're a bastard," Flack said, incredulous and repulsed.

Malfoy did not look at him. "I assure you that my parents were properly married, which is more than I can say for the unfortunate souls who spawned you," he said haughtily. "And there is no shame in admitting you close your eyes and think of someone else. No sensible man wouldn't."

"I don't."

"Thus proving my point," Malfoy muttered drily. "Much as I would thrill to the discussion of Muggle sexual degeneracy-,"

"Why do you need me, Malfoy?" Rebecca interrupted. "When I left wizarding Britain, there was no shortage of reprobate souls willing to compromise their souls for a Galleon."

"Yes, well, war has a nasty habit of eroding available resources, and the Dark Lord has never been known for his generosity."

"And?" Rebecca said shrewdly.

"And no one else can do what you do," he snapped.

Rebecca's expression remained impassive, but Flack had studied her for the past seven years, had traced the lines of her face with tender fingers and warm lips. He had watched her in the bright, sodium lights of the CSI labs and the sickly, yellow light of the café on 34th Street. He'd seen her in the phantasmagoric, washed-out light of the television and the warm flicker of candlelight. He'd seen her face hard with fury and flushed with pleasure. He knew the subtle shifts of her moods, had catalogued them with loving avidity, and when he saw the fleeting narrowing of her eyes, his heart thumped painfully against his ribcage.

_I see a bad moon risin', _he thought nonsensically, and blinked.

"Voldemort is dead, isn't he?" she said slowly. "Harry and the Headmaster killed him."

"The Dark Lord is not dead," Malfoy snapped. "He was immortal. That which is immortal cannot die."

"Well, not all your schooling was a waste, then," Rebecca replied blandly, and Malfoy flushed an alarming puce.

"I don't need your cheek, you stupid bint, I need your mind, and if you don't dispense with the former and offer the latter, I'm going to blow a hole in your husband's skull," he shouted, and swung the gun from her belly to his forehead.

_Thank God, _Flack thought numbly, and the relief was so sweet that he felt the urge to laugh.

"Point the gun at me, Malfoy," Rebecca exclaimed sharply. "At me, you son of a bitch. He's got nothing to do with this." Furious and frantic.

"Leave the gun where it is, Malfoy," Flack countered. To Rebecca, he said, "Calm down, doll. It's gonna be fine. You just breathe and relax and take care of the baby." Rebecca blinked at the mention of the baby, as though she had temporarily forgotten that it rested beneath the swell of her belly. Her hand curled protectively around it. "That's my girl," he murmured.

"I don't take orders from you, Muggle!" Malfoy shrieked, and the gun jittered in his grasp.

"Malfoy, stop!" Rebecca pleaded, and Flack's heart twisted at the fear and tears in her voice. "Stop, please!"

_I'm gonna get you, you fuckin' bastard, _Flack thought savagely. _I've never taken advantage of the unspoken free-shot rule that's lived within these walls since the first willing Paddy pinned a badge to his chest, but you bet your ass I'm gonna. I get your ass in that holdin' cell, even Sheldon won't be able to glue you together again. And if SWAT blows your head off and ends up squeegeeing your brains off the station house floor, I'm gonna piss on your corpse._

"Humility always _did_ suit you better." Malfoy dipped the gun in a jaunty salute.

"I don't understand what you want." Rebecca was crying openly now, and a tear dangled from the end of her chin. Flack's fingers itched to wipe it away. "If Voldemort is dead, you need Necromancy, not Arithmancy, and I can't help you."

Malfoy smirked. "Don't tell me you've never been tempted." Then his voice hardened. "And if you fucking play stupid with me again, you'll be scooping your beloved Muggle's brains from the carpet."

"All right! All right! Just- You want me to unthread Potter's victory," she said dully.

"Quite. A mere turning of the tables is all I ask. Once the Dark Lord has been restored and his victory assured, you can return to your life and your beloved Muggle."

"If I change the past so drastically in the wizarding world, there's no guarantee it won't affect this one. I could come back to find that I never met my husband and he married someone else."

Malfoy rolled his eyes. "Your marital bliss is hardly my concern. Besides, it's equally probable that your life will be unaffected."

"I won't risk losing him. I won't do it."

Malfoy shrugged. "Then you'll lose him now." He leveled the gun at Flack's forehead.

Flack closed his eyes.

"No! No, no, God, no. All right. I'll do it. I'll-," Rebecca shrieked, and began to sob.

He would remember that shriek and the sob that followed it for the rest of his life, and it would keep him with her even after she told him the truth in their bedroom with both hands folded over her belly as though the confession pained her. It was raw and honest and wholly undignified, and it testified with brutal eloquence to the cruel vulnerability of love. He had never heard her shriek that way before, not even when he had pushed into her on his narrow, bachelor's bed one sticky August night. Malfoy and his gun had laid her bare, and he knew that she would shriek that way for no one else.

"How very Gryffindor of you," Malfoy gloated. "And disappointingly predictable." He gestured toward the door with a flick of his gun. "Let's go."

"Not until you let me say goodbye to my husband."

"You're in no position to make demands. Let's go."

Rebecca stiffened. "Either you let me say goodbye to my husband, or you shoot us both and get nothing before every cop in here unloads his magazine into you."

Malfoy and Rebecca regarded one another in silence, and Flack could see them circling each other in wary contemplation. Rebecca's eyes were hard as flint, and Malfoy's gaze was aloof and coolly amused.

_They've done this before, _his father said, gruff and incredulous. _They're old partners in this dance, and even though it's been a long time, their feet remember the steps their minds have forgotten. Around and around they go, treadin' patterns no one else can follow or understand. Neither of them is afraid. In fact, they both look exhilarated by it. Rebecca's been lookin' haggard with all the pukin' and wakin' up in the middle'a the night to pee, but you wouldn't know it now. She's been revitalized._

His old man was right. Despite her red eyes and wet, blotchy cheeks, Rebecca was radiant, and more alert than she had been in the past three months. She sat ramrod-straight in her chair, and her eyes darted rapidly to and fro in their sockets as if she were wrangling with a particularly challenging proof.

_She looks like Riki Tiki Tavi_, he thought absurdly. _A mongoose lookin' for the cobra's soft underbelly._

Malfoy finally spoke. "You have one minute. Never let it be said I wasn't a generous man."

Rebecca snorted and backed her chair behind the desk, feet scraping his shins. She reached for him and cupped his face in her hands, blessedly cool against his burning cheeks. He heaved a shuddering sigh at the contact and wrapped his hands around the delicate bones of her wrists.

"Rebecca, don't go. Stay here with me," he murmured. He almost added, _Where it's safe,_ but the realist in him understood the ridiculous irony of the statement and held his tongue.

A soundless huff of laughter, warm against his cheek and nose. "I don't have much choice. I can't lose you."

"If you walk outta here, I'm gonna lose you. You and Junior both."

Another huff, and her fingers danced over the ridge of his cheekbones and tickled his throbbing temples. "Junior now, is it?"

One hand drifted to her belly and rested there. "Yeah, well, a guy can dream, can't he?" There was no danger in admitting the secret fantasy of his heart now that it was being snatched away.

"Yes, he can, babe," she said softly. Then, "Do you trust me?"

Malfoy's words came back to him, then, harsh and bitter as a curse uttered on hallowed ground. _She's a witch and a merry murderess, to boot. She led fourteen of her friends to die on the Curse-blasted moors of Scotland. She wheedled and manipulated and cajoled, and one by one, they all fell down. When they were dead, she went back to the castle with blood and brains and bits of bone in her hair and called it victory._

He tried to picture it in his mind, but the images were flat and lifeless, cardboard cutouts moving across a rickety stage, a paper doll wearing his wife's face. It was false and illusory, but this Rebecca, the one with her forehead pressed to his and her hands pressed to either side of his face, was real. He could taste her and smell her and feel her, and he had trusted her enough to give her his name and his future.

He brushed his lips against hers, hand cupped protectively around her belly. _Yes._

He felt rather than heard her response, a moist _I love you_ mouthed against his lips.

"Time's up," Malfoy called.

And then Rebecca smiled at him, a feral, sharp-toothed smile he had never seen before, teeth white and glistening and eyes dead as damped embers. She sat up, but she did not move away from him.

"Now, Stanhope. Your Gryffindor sentimentality does you no favors."

The smile widened further still, and Flack fought the urge to push away from her. It was cold and cruel and not quite sane.

"You're forgetting something, Malfoy," she said.

"Oh? What is that? Your staggering thickness?"

She cocked her head and pursed her lips. "I was never officially a Gryffindor," she replied ruefully, and her right hand shot from beneath the desk. "_Sectumsempra!"_

The voice that emerged from his tiny wife was impossible. It was commanding and unapologetic and pitiless, freighted with the timbre of absolute conviction. It was a voice from the bones and sinews, drawn up from her curling toes and hurled from her mouth with the force of law. It was drill sergeants and Mac Taylor and the trumpeting of gods, and he could only stare in stunned stupefaction.

The world flashed red, blood and retribution, and when he could see again, Rebecca was moving toward Malfoy, who was sprawled in front of the desk in a boneless, shuddering heap. She pointed two fingers of her right hand at the gun still lying in his twitching hand, and it squirted from his lax grasp and skidded to a halt against the toe of Flack's shoe.

_She never touched it, _his rational mind gibbered. _It moved on its own. My wife's a fuckin' Jedi. _He found himself giggling at the absurdity of it as he crouched to pick up the gun between his thumb and forefinger.

The giggling stopped abruptly when Rebecca leaned over the side of her chair and seized a handful of Malfoy's clothes. "You're right, Malfoy," she hissed. "I did lie and steal and manipulate." She punctuated each confession with a shake that made Malfoy's head loll and bob bonelessly on his neck. "I talked my fourteen friends onto that field, knowing none of them would come back, and I watched them all die. Jackson Decklan met his Maker facedown in the bloody mud with a worthless chunk of rock in his hand, and I loved him best. If I would sacrifice my friends for the sake of a man who considered me a means to an end and who tossed me aside when I had served my purpose, what did you think I would do for a man who loves me?" She shook him continuously now, a terrier with a rat in its jaws. The hand fisted in his clothes was slathered in blood from the gaping wound in Malfoy's throat.

_She's gonna have a miscarriage if she keeps carryin' on like that. There's too much adrenaline, and it's not natural to be bent that way._

"Rebecca." He set the gun on his desk and started for her. "Rebecca, it's okay now."

Rebecca gave no sign that she had heard him. Her gaze was fixed on the ruin of Malfoy's throat and the blood trickling sluggishly from the wound.

"You threatened what is mine," she spat, and her eyes blazed inside her face.

"Rebecca," he snapped. "That enough, goddammit."

She flinched, startled, and then looked at him. Her eyes were wild and unfocused, and there was no recognition in them. Then her shoulders slumped, and she released what was left of Malfoy. She looked at her blood-slicked hand, flexed the fingers as though she couldn't quite believe they were hers, and began to cry, slowly and softly at first, but gaining in volume and intensity until she was rocking and wailing in her chair, hand fisted against the hard bone of her sternum like a perverse Roman salute.

He enfolded her in his arms and rested his chin atop her head, and his heart ached as he listened to her choke and snuffle and sob against his neck. "'S all right, doll. You done good. Deep breaths for me, mm?" He winnowed his fingers through her hair and cradled the back of her head in his palm. "Right now, you're suckin' wind like a Hoover, and it's gonna make you dizzy." He shifted his weight from his toes to his heels in his crouch and called to a rookie uniform who was gaping at the scene in queasy incredulity. "Call a bus." Not that it mattered; Malfoy was dead as shit and sheetrock, but best to do it by the book.

"Don't bother," Rebecca muttered from the hollow of his neck. "In twenty minutes, nobody will remember this."

"Honey, I don't see how anyone could forget it."

She only offered him a sad, weary smile and retreated to the hollow of his neck again.

Five minutes after Malfoy went down, four cops from a neighboring precinct arrived, stamping their feet and shaking the snow from the shoulders of their jacket. Three of them headed for the captain's office without so much as a glance at the carnage in the bullpen, while the fourth, a thin Hispanic man with close-cropped hair and light olive skin, approached them.

"Rebecca Stanhope?" he said.

"It's Flack now, but yes," Rebecca answered from the vicinity of his neck.

The officer pursed his lips and consulted his notebook. "Hm. I have no record of your name change on file."

"I dropped out of wizarding society in 1997 and had no intention of entering it again. Wouldn't have, if Malfoy hadn't shown up. My marriage certificate is on file with the Muggle authorities. February 2, 2003."

The officer jotted the information into his notebook. "We'll check that out. You called the perpetrator Malfoy. Did you know him?" He jerked his head in the direction of the body.

"We were schoolmates at Hogwarts and fought on opposite sides in the war."

"The war?"

"Against Voldemort."

The officer's pen froze. "Against Volde-," He trailed off. "You're _that _Rebecca Stanhope?"

She raised her head from the crook of his neck. "Rebecca _Flack_," she repeated patiently. "But yes, I suppose I am."

"What's the fuck is going on?" Flack demanded. It was exasperated and plaintive.

"He don't know?" the officer asked Rebecca.

"He does now," she answered mildly.

The officer turned to him. "Your wife was one of sixteen Americans to fight in the war against Voldemort, and the only one to survive. It's in all the American wizarding history books."

Rebecca cackled. "My friends all died on a scorched, blood-soaked moor, and I made the history books." Her voice was tight and strained, and he felt hysteria beneath her skin like the furtive shiftings of parasitic contagion.

Flack shook his head. "Look, I don't know who the fuck you are, pal, but you better start tellin' me what's goin' on. In case you haven't noticed, my wife is pregnant, she needs to lie down, and I need a goddamned drink."

The officer offered his hand. "Auror Tony Ramirez."

Flack ignored the proffered hand. "What the fuck is an Auror, and what precinct are you from?"

"Magical law enforcer, and the 129th," came the reply.

Flack narrowed his eyes. "Never heard of the 129th," he countered suspiciously.

"Well, you wouldn't," Ramirez said calmly. "You're a Muggle."

_Muggle. _There was that word again, strange and secretive and dissonant, a word wrested from the playful context of a child's tale and pressed into the service of the mundane. He was no genius-that was the sole province of his exhausted wife-but he knew how to read the inflections of words and the people who spoke them. There was no malice in it as there had been with Malfoy, but there was a subtle condescension that prickled his skin.

_You're not what he is, and he knows it, _his father muttered. _I bet that word is Magical Prick for uneducated douchebag. You could always remind them that his shit stinks._

Ramirez turned his attention to Rebecca once more and flipped to a fresh sheet in his notebook. "So, you want to tell me what happened here?"

"I was eating an anniversary hoagie with my husband-," Rebecca pointed in the direction of the desk, where the half-eaten hoagie sat hardening on its deli paper. "-and Malfoy came in and pointed a gun at my stomach. Then he pointed it at my husband's head. I killed him. I meant to do it, I'm not sorry I did it, and I'd do it again to anyone who threatens what is mine. I would see this city burn if anything happened to him."

Flack stared at the crown of his wife's head. His heart was a hot, throbbing ball inside his chest, and he wanted to sit down, tuck his head between his knees, and breathe. The world as he'd always known it had been obliterated in a flash of crimson, and the one thing he had always thought immutable was unfamiliar. Rebecca had always been soft and timid beneath his hands, shy even with people she knew well, and in his heart, he had long suspected she was not a human at all, but a miracle fashioned of spidersilk and hubris. She was tough as old rawhide beneath her smooth, cold skin, but life had not robbed her of her innocence and sense of wonder at the simple pleasures of the world.

_Like watching Derek Jeter hit a bomb out of Yankee Stadium one August night, _he thought, and his throat constricted.

She wasn't soft anymore. Now she was hard and jagged, all angular joints and fleshless bone. He groped for her softness, for the velvet smoothness of her nape or the unblemished, soothing texture of her pregnancy-rounded cheek, but his fingers had gone numb, and he could feel neither of them. Her eyes had changed, too. They were dull and distant and unspeakably weary.

"What hex or Curse did you use to kill him?" Ramirez asked. He was all business now, pen poised elegantly over the paper.

When she spoke, her voice was hoarse and parched. "Sectumsempra." She traced her fingers over his scalp, brushing at unseen hairs.

"Sectumsempra?" Ramirez repeated. "You are aware that's classified as a Gray, or Restricted, Curse? Some here have been lobbying to have it reclassified as a Dark Curse."

She shrugged. "Its designation in the wizarding world is of no consequence to me. What did matter was its efficacy. I wanted him to suffer, and he did. It hurt like a son of a bitch before he gargled to death on his precious Pure blood. Besides, I used far worse during the war."

Flack swallowed an agonized moan. This was not his wife, this seething, hardened dybbuk in his arms, and yet it had to be, because her fingers and hands were as tender on his face as they had ever been. They danced over his jawline and gently skirted a razor cut he had given himself that morning, standing over their bathroom sink with Barbasol slathered over his face and listening to her bring up the remnants of last night's dinner.

_This is not my wife, _he thought again. _My wife cries at _Old Yeller _and at dead cats on the street. She'd buy every kitten she saw if I wasn't allergic, and the puppies in Central Park reduce her to giggling, cooing mush, and until she came up pregnant, I was thinkin'a buyin her a dog to keep her company when I gotta work double and triple shifts. She likes lookin' at our neighbors' windowboxes in the spring, and when I bought her an Easter lily and a stuffed rabbit on a whim two Easters ago, she lit up like a Christmas tree and screwed my brains out._

She loves me, and she teaches math to idiots and burnouts who don't deserve to know what she knows, and sometime in late July or early August, she's gonna have my baby. She does not kill. That's my job when push comes to shove, and that's why, at the end of every shift, I shower three times in the precinct shower with the Irish Spring soap that she loves so much. I don't want to carry the slow-killing, soul-eating taint of this job home to her, to smear it on our bed every time I roll over in the night, or slip it unawares into her when we make love, a prenatal legacy from Dear Old Fuck-Up Dad to the next generation. I don't want her to smell death on my skin when I come home, and have bitterness fed to her like stale, soured wedding cake. And now she's sittin' here in my arms with a mangled corpse beside her, discussin' death like she's seen it a thousand times.

Ramirez' lips thinned as he scribbled in his notebook. "This isn't a war."

"Isn't it?" Rebecca said quietly, and her tone and the accompanying smirk were so much like Malfoy that he recoiled.

Malfoy had brought this madness with him, had carried it on his hands and his clothes and the soles of his feet, the dust of the past come to cloud the present. He had passed it to her, perhaps when he had drawn the muzzle of the gun over her belly in a slow, proprietary caress, and Flack hated him. He wanted to kick that patrician nose and those delicate, hollowed cheeks until they shattered and ground like porcelain beneath that cooling, ivory skin. He could easily imagine gouging out his lifeless, gray eyes with his ballpoint pen and pulping them underfoot. He tasted metal shavings and bile in his mouth, and he rose from his protective crouch to pace in an erratic, loping circle, hands laced behind his head.

"Jesus fuckin' Christ, Rebecca," he said thickly.

Ramirez spared him a cursory glance. "Mrs. Flack, I'm going to need to see your wand."

"And I'd let you if I had one on my person."

Ramirez blinked. "You don't have a wand? Then how did you-?"

"The UK is far freer with its magical practices, and the war ensured that I had plenty of opportunity for practical application."

"Wandless magic?"

A single nod. "Most of us could by the end."

Ramirez closed his notebook with a snap. "I'm gonna have to talk with my supervisor. You wait here." He turned on his heel and went to join his colleagues in the captain's office.

Twenty minutes later, it was all over. Ramirez returned to report that in all likelihood, the incident would be ruled a matter of self-defense. She would need to report to the New York circuit of the American Wizengamot to give an accounting of the incident, and it would be adjudicated at that time, he told her, and while he spoke, two of his colleagues placed a sheet over Malfoy's body and carried it out the fire escape. One black-nailed hand dangled limply from beneath the sheet and brushed the floor as they disappeared from view.

Flack watched over Ramirez' shoulder as, one by one, the officers of the 14th were called into the captain's office. One by one, they came out again, eyes glazed and faces slack, and they wished one another Merry Christmas and Happy Thanksgiving as they passed in the center aisle of the bullpen. When he asked one of the emerging uniforms what had happened in there, he could not remember. None of them could.

_In twenty minutes, nobody's going to remember this, _Rebecca had said, and none of them did.


	2. Part II

Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.

All recognizable people, places, and events in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. In all cases, no infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

He signed out a department car and drove her home in white-knuckled silence. He felt Rebecca's gaze on his cheek, willing him to look at her or at least break the suffocating silence in the car, but he could do neither. He could not look at her because he was afraid that if he did, he would catch sight of the bones of her face rearranging themselves into someone he did not recognize, and he could not speak because breathing was harsh as sand in his throat and words would cut like serrated steel.

She was the first to speak, after they'd gotten home and she'd mad a mad, scrabbling dash for the bathroom to relieve her shrunken, fetally-abused bladder. "Have I lost you?" she asked quietly from the cool, concealing shadow of the kitchen doorway.

He'd made a beeline for the kitchen and now stood with one hand curled possessively around the neck of a bottle of Jim Beam. He took a prodigious quaff straight from it, and he welcomed the blossom of heat in his chest and belly.

"What the fuck was that?" He took another generous pull from the bottle and did not turn around. "What the goddamn holy fuck was that?"

"Magic."

"Magic," he repeated.

"Malfoy was a liar and a murderer, but every lie holds a kernel of truth. I'm a witch."

He snorted and tightened his grip on the bottle, so solid and real between his fingers. "Like Samantha from _Bewitched_?"

"More like Morgana and Merlin."

"And when were you plannin' on tellin' _me_ this, huh?" He whirled to face her, bottle in hand. "Lettin' me in on your little secret?"

"At first, never," she admitted with a lopsided shrug of her shoulders. "Then when I found out I was pregnant, I was going to tell you before the baby was born so you wouldn't be surprised if it turned out it had inherited magical ability. Malfoy just…expedited the process."

"That-whatever you did in there can be inherited?"

"Yes, magical ability can be passed from parent to child," she conceded. "It's most common when one or both parents are magical, but it can happen to any couple. My folks were magical as potting soil." She pressed her palms together and placed the fingertips against her wan lips.

"So you're telling me that my kid could be a fuckin' X-man?" he shouted. "Why didn't you see fit to tell me this before? Didn't you think I'd want to know that oh-so-minor detail about our future?"

_It might be an X-man, but it still yours. _Aunt Lucia, his mother's sister, who had taught him his love of cooking and his loathing of hospitals, and who had died of cancer by agonizing inches when he was eleven. _You made it with her in love and happiness and hope. You loved it then; why shouldn't you love it now? If you forget your love for him who is becoming in his mother's belly and her who is breathing life into him with every rise and fall of her swelling bosom, then this bad Malfoy man has won everything._

An image arose in his mind of the night in the department SUV down by the river. His hands tangled in Rebecca' hair as he kissed her, and laughing as she tickled his ribs with her stiff, insistent fingers. She'd tasted of wine and melon, and when he'd ventured further south to the valley between her breasts, she'd been tart and spicy as Communion wine on his tongue. Underwear pushed around thighs and knees, and The Beach Boys and Otis Redding on the radio. He'd wanted to take her to the places the songs sung about, to the sun and the sand and the salt sea air, but the river was all he had or could afford, and so he had given her the river.

Rebecca took a deep breath and closed her eyes. "I couldn't tell you. The magical world has survived as long as it has because we live in secrecy. Since you were a Mu-," She flinched.

"A Muggle?" he supplied helpfully, the word spit from his mouth like a lump of cold gristle. "'S that magical for retard?"

"No," she said softly. "No. It just means that you're not magical, is all. There are more derogatory words by far-Mudblood, blood traitor, half-breed, Squib." She scrubbed her face with her hands. "But yes. Since you were a Muggle, not to mention a Muggle in law enforcement, I thought it was forbidden."

He uttered a bitter laugh and took another pull of Beam.

_That's true enough, _the voice of his old training partner, Gavin Moran, said inside his head. _You can see it in her face. She did think it was verboten, but there's another reason behind that one, a truer one, elusive as the silver spark of a fishing lure in muddy river water._

"That the only reason you didn't tell me?" he asked shrewdly.

"What?" Yes."

He slammed the bottle onto the counter hard enough to slosh the contents over the side and closed the distance between them in two strides. He seized the arms of her chair and bent until his forehead grazed hers. "No," he shouted. "No more fuckin' lyin' to me, Rebecca. I just sat behind my desk and watched you slit a guy's throat without touchin' him, and then cops from a precinct I never heard of come and tell me my wife's an international war hero. I've had enough of this bullshit, and if you never told me a truth in your life, you're gonna tell me one now."

_You keep screamin' like that, you might just join Malfoy in the Great Dirtnap, Charlie Brown, _the voice of prudence cautioned, but Rebecca merely flinched from his anger, eyes closing and head tucking to her chest with every rise and fall of his voice.

"I-," A barely audible whisper.

And then he knew. _One abomination he could stand, but not two._

"Fuck you," he snarled in wounded disgust, and shoved past her into the living room.

He sat on the couch for a while, hands fisted on his lap, but despite the rush of blood in his ears, he could still hear her sobbing. Ordinarily, the sound of Rebecca weeping drove a hot spike of worry and anguish into his heart, but anger had formed a hard scrim of indifference, and it inspired only irritation. He stalked into their bedroom and slammed the door to escape it, but faint strains slipped beneath the door. He went into the bathroom and turned on the sink. There. That was better. He splashed cold water on his face and sipped it from his cupped palm and stood, panting, in front of the mirror, head down so he couldn't see his reflection.

A rational part of him untouched by the anger ravening in his gut like influenza knew that he was being too hard, too cruel, that delayed adrenaline had sharpened his tongue, but he couldn't care less. The innocence he thought he'd captured in a bottle had proven false, and all he could see when he closed his eyes was Rebecca, looming over Malfoy in her chair like an avenging harpy, hand clawed in his bloodied, tattered shirt like a talon and painted red with savage vengeance.

He left the water on and shambled into the bedroom to sit on the bed. He was exhausted and thoroughly used up, and he wanted to lie down and let bourbon and weariness send him to sleep, but he dared not close his eyes, and so he remained upright and scrubbed his face with his hands.

_She's a good girl, my Donnie boy, _said Aunt Lucia, and phantom fingers brushed his temple. _She's always been a good girl, and she did what any mother does. She protected her offspring, and she protected you because she loved you. It was hard, and it was ugly, but that is life, isn't it? You know it is, my good boy. You see it every day. Life sours you and uses you up, and sometimes it makes you cry before it turns you over to Death. She did what she had to._

_She killed him, _his mind protested. _Dead, _it added redundantly.

_You were gonna do the same thing, _Gavin pointed out pragmatically. _If you coulda reached your gun, you'd'a blown his brains all over the precinct, and even after he was dead, you fantasized about gouging out his eyes with your ballpoint pen and squashin' 'em like grapes. That mighta been satisfyin', but I don't think it falls into the category of self-defense._

_Of course I was gonna blow his brains out, _he countered vehemently. _He was threatenin' my wife and kid._ _That's my job, to protect her. _

It was Stella who responded. _But she's not allowed to protect you? That's a nice case of sexist martyrdom you got there, Flack._

_She lied to me, _he protested, and was alarmed at how childishly petulant he sounded.

_You're hardly one to talk about lies of omission. _His father. _After all, she knows you got a dead sister, but she don't know that it's your fault. She doesn't know that the last person to trust you so completely wound up at the bottom of the stairs with a broken neck. Would she be so ready to entrust herself to your arms if she knew of their propensity for clumsiness? She doesn't know how dangerous you can be, or didn't, but after your performance in the kitchen, I think she's learning._

He saw Rebecca weeping and cringing from his blind anger, and his sister, Diana, with snot dripping from her nose as he berated her for ruining his shot with the neighborhood kiss-and-tell. They were lifetimes and worlds apart, and yet the eyes were the same, deep blue and pleading and hopelessly confused. One blended into the other until he could no longer tell them apart. It hurt to think of Diana, and he could not bring himself to think of Rebecca. It was easier to hold on to his anger, and so he lay down, pulled his feet onto the bed without bothering to kick off his shoes, put a pillow over his head to block out the light and memories, and let sleep take him.

When he awoke again, it was to the sound of a police car passing in the night, the warbling, banshee wail of its siren screaming for a victim not yet found. There was the sound of running water, too, and at first, he could not remember why. Then he opened his eyes, and the memories returned. Rebecca had killed a man in his name, and he had left her in the kitchen to cry while he retreated to the bedroom to lick his wounds. What he did not hear was Rebecca.

He sat up abruptly and swung his legs over the side of the bed, mouth sour with the aftertaste of bourbon. The digital display on the alarm clock read three thirty-six in the morning.

"Shit," he said dully, and scrubbed at his teeth with a sandpaper tongue.

He checked her side of the bed, but it was empty and undisturbed, and his heart thudded painfully inside his chest. She should have been in bed hours ago. She tired easily now, though she tried to hide it, and most nights, she was asleep by eleven, curled into a fetal position with one arm outstretched onto his side of the bed, seeking him as she dreamed.

_Maybe she just decided to sleep on the couch. You guys have never had such a big blowout before, and them pregnancy mood swings ain't doin' you no favors. You freaked out, and now she's lyin' low, is all._

_Yes, you freaked, _agreed his father. _You freaked, and maybe she ran. She's not like Diana, thirteen and helpless, with no way of escapin' your belligerent mouth. She's an adult, and if she can kill a man with a word and a point of her bony finger, what makes you think she don't got the balls to pack her bags and fade into the fabric of the city like lifting fog? If she's fuckin' magical, who's to say she can't flee the world in the blink of an eye? She's got five hours on you. She could be in Timbuktu by now._

_Your old man's right, _sneered the pernicious imp of self-doubt that nestled at the base of his brain like a latent tumor. _For all her frailty, Rebecca is a proud woman, and much as she loves you, she won't be your whipping post. Once the sting of your verbal slap subsides, she'll bare the teeth you've always sensed behind the smile and lay open your jugular. _

_It would be easy. She knows your weakness, your fear of abandonment. If nothing else, this evening at the precinct demonstrated her lust for vengeance and retribution. She could have left while you were suckling your anger, and if she did, you'll never find her, APBs and BOLOs be damned. You'll search and search and never find, and when six months have gone by with no leads, her case file will get lost under a mountain of tree pulp and fresh atrocity, and a year after that, it will be relegated to the cold files, alphabetized beside Diana's box. You can visit them both in a perverse family reunion, and she will become a living dream for which you reach in the night, but cannot find in the morning. Birthdays and anniversaries will come and go, and twenty years from now, a kid with blue eyes and dark hair will turn up on your doorstep, achingly familiar and remote as the moon. He will have your name and your face, but he will not have your memories, and he will not love you. He will have called another man "father."_

An unseen blade twisted beneath his breastbone and winnowed in his gut in search of fresh hurt. "She wouldn't do that," he told the room.

_Until tonight, you never would have thought she was capable of murder, either, and you never would have imagined yourself screaming into her face, _the imp insisted.

He rose from the bed and went into the living room, which was dark and silent and full of February chill. Rebecca was not there, nor was there a rumpled blanket on the couch to indicate that she had ever bedded down. The light in the kitchen was still on, and he made his way toward it, toeing off his dress shoes as he went.

"Rebecca?"

She was in the kitchen in the same spot in which he'd left her five hours before, but she had obviously moved in the interim, because there was a pot of boiling water on the stove and the Rubbermaid bucket they used for cleaning on her lap. She looked up at the sound of his approach.

"Couldn't sleep, so I decided to make tea," she explained. "Then I got sick." As if to prove the point, she retched weakly into the bucket again.

"Oh, God." He padded across the linoleum in his socked feet and rummaged in the cabinets for a clean glass. He filled it with water from the tap and brought it to her. "Here. Slow sips."

They didn't talk after that. She sipped the water, and he took the Rubbermaid bucket to the sink to wash it, and for a long time, the only sounds were the hiss of water coming to boil and the gurgling rush of it spilling from the tap.

"Do you want me to leave?" she asked at length.

"Jesus Christ," he snapped, and dropped the sponge he'd been using to scrub the bucket with a wet plop. "What the fuck do you want me to do? To say?"

"Say that five years ago today was still the best day of your life. Say that I didn't fu-fu-," She was crying again, a defeated, miserable sound from the back of her throat.

Such a simple thing, a _right _thing, and he was not sure he could. The love was still there, rich and agonizingly sweet, but so was the bewildered hurt that had come with the realization that she had kept this from him out of fear. It was raw and gritty and tender to the touch, and as he stood over the sink with dish soap and vomit on his hands, he wondered what else she had not told him. What else was hidden behind those kisses and feverish endearments, to pop out at him the next time a remnant of her past emerged from the sewer?

"Does your back hurt?" was his only answer.

She moaned, and he knew he had scored a deep hit. The part of him that loved her recoiled and clamored to set it right with gentle hands, but the hurt was too strong, and the imp at the base of his brain capered and sank its dirty, serrated claws more deeply into the tendons of his neck to secure its foothold.

"Of course it hurts. Been sitting all day."

"Why don't you go get undressed? I'll run you a bath."

"But the tea," she began.

"I'll take care of it," he said brusquely. "You're stressin' yourself out, and it ain't good for either one of you. Caffeine's the last thing you need right now."

He thought she was going to argue, but then he heard the sound of her wheels as she rolled out of the kitchen, the sussurating shift of snake skin over dried leaves. He waited until she was gone before he turned around. His eyes were hot and prickling, and there was a heavy poultice on his chest, but he refused to cry. His old man had told him a long ago that crying was for pussies, and while he had been proven wrong about much of the wisdom he had passed down, that was one he had gotten right. He turned off the stove with a flick of his wrist and followed her into the bedroom.

She had wrestled her way out of her shirt and was wrangling with her bra by the time he arrived. One breast dangled freely, but the other was still trapped within the snug confines of the cup. With no shirt to cover it, the rounding hump of her belly was unmistakable, and his throat constricted at the sight of it. His Junior was in there, nestled against her stomach and reaching for his mother's heart with every passing week. In a few more weeks, he would be kicking and spinning beneath Rebecca's skin, pressing his tiny feet into her bladder with innocent glee.

_Do you really want to miss out on that because your wife had the balls to defend herself and you and that baby? Who gives a damn how she did it? You know damn well that if she'd gone with that dirtbag, you never would have seen either of them again, or if you did, she'd be facedown in some dumpster with her throat slashed and rats crawling out of her mouth and cunt. Mac and Stella would have handled her with care, and Hammerbeck would have conducted her autopsy with dignity, might even have wrapped your still-forming Junior in his own tiny shroud, but the fact remains that they wouldn't be here now._

Rebecca finally bested her bra and dropped it atop her blouse. She reached behind her and fumbled with the zipper to her skirt.

"I got it." He dropped to his knees and slipped his hands behind her.

She moaned when his fingers grazed the hard knob of her spine, whether in pleasure or pain, he could not tell. He pressed again, harder this time, and she arched, eyelids fluttering and lips parting. The muscle beneath his finger was contracted and hot, and he kneaded gently, willing it to relax.

"'S okay, doll," he murmured, and as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew they were true. Malfoy was in Hell where he belonged, and it didn't matter how Rebecca had put him there. All that mattered was that she had, and that his family was safe.

She mewled and pushed off on the footrests to better arch against his massaging fingers. The tension beneath his hands was gradually dissipating, but he could feel it massing in other places-between her shoulder blades, her nape, her thighs. He dipped his head and mouthed her belly in a gesture of comfort, and her skin rippled beneath his lips.

"I don't care if you're an X-man or a Jedi, you hear me?" he murmured to the baby inside her. "You just keep growin' in there, and me and your Ma'll look out for you."

Rebecca's hand came down to stroke his hair, soft and not quite steady, and it invoked memories of the funeral of Officer Lipnicki, where he had fallen apart and she had put him back together again with the ceaseless stroking of her hands.

_I took your secrets when I took your name, sight unseen, _she'd said then, and in her hands had been acceptance and absolution.

Well, now the time had come for him to return a favor freely given. He would take her secrets and make them his own, take them into himself without knowing them if need be. He had agreed to them when he had slipped his ring onto her finger and his seed into her womb, and it was too late to renege.

_She lied to you, _shrieked the imp, outraged at this sudden reversal of fortune. _She lied to you for all these years. _But it was distant and unimportant, its claws scrabbling ineffectually for purchase as it tumbled into the abyss.

He let out a ragged breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding and mouthed the spot above her navel. She was moaning in time to the rhythm of his hands in the small of her back, head lolling and eyes closed.

"Would you tell me?" he murmured against her belly. "If I asked?"

The moaning stopped, but her hands continued their slow caress of his scalp. "About…then?"

"Yeah." He nipped at her flesh and was rewarded with a gasp.

"Yes. Are you sure you want to know?"

He thought of Gavin, then, his old partner who lived in an apartment gone to seed and stinking bachelorhood. He had had a wife and daughters once, but a secret sixteen years in the ground had risen from its uneasy grave and swept them all away, and now Gavin drank and grew fat alone and did not return his phone calls.

"No," he admitted. "I'm not sure, but I gotta know what I'm up against."

"All right," she said.

"Can you eat somethin'? Some soup, maybe?"

"I'm not that hungry, but Junior could use it, I guess."

"I think we got a can of vegetable soup." He raised his head to kiss her, but she moved out of range.

"Don't. I barfed, remember?"

"I don't care. And how could I forget? It gave me dishpan hands."

She gave an indelicate snort of laughter, and he chased her bobbing mouth to press a kiss to the corner.

"I'm gonna fix you that soup, and when I come back, we can talk. You know, if you're up to it." He rose from his knees with a grimace and the crackle of protesting joints and went into the kitchen.

"I love you, Don Flack," she called after him.

When he returned from the kitchen twenty minutes later with a steaming bowl of soup for Rebecca and a cup of coffee for himself, Rebecca had divested herself of the rest of her clothes and climbed into bed. He set the tray of food on the night stand beside the bed and took off his tie.

"We don't have to talk about this tonight," he said, and unbuttoned his shirt. "You're fuckin' exhausted, I can tell." He slipped off his shirt and tossed it haphazardly in the direction of the laundry hamper.

"You missed," Rebecca pointed out wryly.

"Yeah, well." He shrugged nonchalantly, but he ambled to the shirt, pinched it between his toes, lifted it to his hand, and tossed it into the hamper.

"Showoff."

"Yeah, yeah."

"And for the record, I'd tell you anything if you'd take off your clothes."

"You've got a dirty mind," he told her, but he slipped out of his pants and boxers.

"Oh, my God." Amused and bewildered.

"Hey, I want a cooperative witness."

He went into the bathroom and emerged with her plastic shower chair. He set it beside the bed, picked up the tray from the night stand, and tested her soup with a small sip from the spoon.

"That too hot?" he asked, and offered her a spoonful.

She leaned forward and dipped her tongue into the liquid. "No, it's fine, babe."

He sat down and fed her a few spoonfuls before he spoke again. "Tell me-tell-," He stopped to gather his composure and his scattered thoughts. "Tell me what you can," he said at last.

She looked at him for a long time. "I saw Hogwarts for the first time when I was fifteen," she began, and told him everything.

She spoke for more than two hours, and when she stopped, it was nearly dawn. He wanted to say something when she finished, but what she had told him had rendered his mind slow and stupid with shock, and he could only cup her cheek in his hand and press butterfly kisses to her forehead.

_How? _his detective's mind demanded. _How can this be? There are no such things as dragons and Death Eaters and Killing Curses and invocations to raise the dead. She's sick. She's had a breakdown or been abused, and she compensated for the trauma by couching it in terms of the fairy tale. You see it all the time in child abuse cases._

And yet, the more he considered it, the less fanciful it seemed. As a cop, he had witnessed endless evidence of man's depravity and inhumanity, and if he still wanted for proof, the news archives bulged with footage of child armies in Ghana and the Jonestown cult. The Nazis goose-stepped through history classes in perpetuity, preserved in the grainy amber of 8mm film. Why couldn't she have fought and slaughtered and been forced to make adult decisions as a child? It happened every day without the benefit of magic, and he could find no other explanation for what had happened in the precinct last night.

_She never should have lived any of that, _his mind wailed. _It wasn't fair. She was just a kid._

_But she did, _his father said, not unkindly. _She did, and she got through it. It was a baptism by fire, and it made her strong as adamant and Pittsburgh steel. It's why she gets out of bed with a smile, and how she can let you walk out the door every morning, knowing you might never come home. She knows what you face out there on a daily basis because she's faced it herself with nothing but a stick and her belief that the stick was enough. It made her tough enough to live in the shadow of death and carry that baby with no assurance you'll be there to help her raise it. So much as you might hate it, you might as well get on your knees and thank God for it, because it made her what she is._

The questions came then in a torrent, but they would have to keep. Rebecca was exhausted. Her eyes were raw and bruised, and her chin drooped to her chest. He peeled his buttocks from the shower seat and settled her onto her side.

"Go to sleep now, doll." He pulled the covers to her chin.

"You c'min?" Slurred and entreating.

"Sssh. Sssh. I'm just gonna take the dishes into the kitchen and call my captain, all right? I'll be right back."

He did exactly that, and when he came back, Rebecca was already deeply asleep. He watched her from the doorway for a long time, until the red disk of the sun peeked above the horizon, and when he went to her, he tucked her firmly against him and curled his arm protectively over her belly. Tomorrow, he would ask his questions, and she would have all day to answer them because the captain had given him the day off. There would be a penalty, of course, paid in a double shift the day after and a triple on Good Friday a few months down the road, but that was fine.

"Five years ago yesterday is still the best day of my life," he whispered into her ear, and though she was asleep, her lips curled into a smile.


End file.
